Little Big Man

The narrator of Thomas Berger s masterly picaresque tale of the Old West is 111-year-old Jack Crabb, who, as a child, came to be the son of two fathers one white, the other a Cheyenne Indian chief who gave him the name Little Big Man. Jack drifts through the decades of expansion in the West and war against the Plains Indians with his loyalties divided. As a Cheyenne Jack Crabb feasts on dog, loves four wives and sees his people butchered by General Custer s soldiers. Later he is present at Little Big Horn and can claim to be the sole white survivor of the battle. As a white man, he helps hunt the buffalo into near-extinction, tangles with Wyatt Earp and survives a showdown with Wild Bill Hickock. Little Big Man is a hugely enjoyable fiction, part-farcical, part-historical, and the very best of all novels about the American West.